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It’s not unusual for us to hear allegations that journals have caved to corporate demands that they retract papers. And companies have certainly objected to the publication of results that painted their products in an unflattering light.

But what we’ve never explicitly seen is a retraction notice that comes right out and says that the only reason a paper is being removed from the literature is that a company complained. That’s the jaw-dropping case with “Visual defects among consumers of processed cassava (gari),” a paper published earlier this year in the African Journal of Food Sciences:

The retraction is based on the fact that a Gari processing company has requested the retraction this paper from journal’s website and publisher’s database since it is crumbling their business inputs to their competitors leading to a drastic reduction in customers and consumers hence affecting their productivity and profitability.

Yusuf A. Z and all co-authors are deeply sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused to the editorial staff, readers and other researchers.

Yusuf is an employee of the Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation, according to the paper, which does not say which Gari processing companies’ products were studied.